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Santa
rides a cast-iron sleigh made in the United States in the latter part of the
nineteenth century. When pushed across the floor, the reindeer move up and down
as if leaping from roof to roof.

Betokening Christmas

photography by Tom Green

captions by Jan Gilliam

America accumulates Christmas
customs, symbols, artifacts, ideas, practices, and paraphernalia like a child
rolling up a snowman on the family front lawn. As the season winds, year after
year, across the landscape of popular culture, its girth expands like Santa
Claus's belly.

Celebration has long
been the core of Christmas in this country. But it took time to pick up things
as simple as evergreen wreaths and as elaborate as homes hung with icicle
lights. It was not until the nineteenth century—1842 in
Williamsburg—that the Christmas tree became the altar of Yuletide hopes.
Our image of jolly old Saint Nick didn't stick until a couple of decades after
that, when Thomas Nast drew him for a Civil War issue of Harper's
Illustrated Weekly.

It took time for what
answers to our idea of a toy—miniature sleighs, dollhouses, rocking
horses, locomotives, and more—to become a holiday appurtenance, and
longer for it to become so highly manufactured as tricycles or Tickle Me Elmos.

The collections of Colonial
Williamsburg's Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum help illustrate the
progress of the festivities. In their inventories are objects and images that
betoken the ever-expanding joys of Christmas. A few of them are exampled on
these pages.